


Don't leave quite yet

by Elisexyz



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Episode: s02e15 The Queen Is Dead, F/M, Injury, Poison
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-07
Updated: 2018-10-07
Packaged: 2019-07-27 17:54:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16224284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elisexyz/pseuds/Elisexyz
Summary: Everything happens so fast that Emma’s brain struggles to catch up: one moment she’s talking with Gold, the other she’s being pushed against the wall, Neal has rushed back to them and managed to get close enough to get himself involved in the altercation, and then her blood runs cold when Gold lets out an horrified: “Bae!”Hook accidentally stabs Neal instead of Rumplestiltskin. Nobody is particularly happy about it.





	Don't leave quite yet

**Author's Note:**

> I think I saw a Tumblr prompt somewhere about Neal getting stabbed instead of his father, but it was some time ago and I can't find it anywehre. So. uhm. it was inspired by that? If I find a link I'll add it.  
>  Also, this is a fill for the "Poison/Venom" prompt in [my Bad Things Happen Bingo card on Tumblr](http://heytheredeann.tumblr.com/post/178827376774/poisonvenom-fill-for-the-bad-things-happen).

Everything happens so fast that Emma’s brain struggles to catch up: one moment she’s talking with Gold, the other she’s being pushed against the wall, Neal has rushed back to them and managed to get close enough to get himself involved in the altercation, and then her blood runs cold when Gold lets out an horrified: “ _Bae!”_

Emma is still a bit unsteady when she comes closer to the three of them, Neal sinking to the ground, pressed against his father, who’s holding tight onto him but can’t seem to be able to keep the two of them upright, and Hook still has that damn hook stuck in Neal’s chest. He takes it out, mumbling a shell-shocked “ _Shit”_ that doesn’t earn him an ounce of sympathy, as far as she’s concerned.

She pushes him away with all the strength that she can muster, and Hook doesn’t oppose any resistance, thankfully. Her focus immediately moves to Neal, who’s looking pretty rattled and trying to reach for the wound.

“Let me look at it,” she says, quickly, and she’s out of breath and her hands tremble a little, but Gold looks like a _mess_ one second away from a crying fit and Neal is the one bleeding, so it’s not like there are other candidates for the role of responsible, calm adult.

“Mom,” Henry calls, still behind the gate. Her eyes shoot up, and she finds that he’s staring at them, eyes wide in horror, and that he’s moving a step forward.

“Henry, no,” she immediately says, probably a bit more sharply than she normally would. “Stay there, alright? Don’t move.”

“But—”

“ _Henry_.”

“I’m fine, buddy,” Neal calls, and his voice is a little strained but he does good, all things considered. Good thing that Henry is behind him and can’t see his face, because he doesn’t look _fine_ at all. “I’ll be as good as new, just listen to your mom.”

“O—okay,” Henry murmurs, looking far from convinced but staying where he is, at least.

Neal smiles slightly at her, and she somehow managed to reciprocate, relieved. “This is by far the dumbest thing you’ve ever done,” she complains, quietly, as she finally manages to push away enough clothing to take a look at the wound: it’s not _good_ , but it’s not as deep as she’d feared.

“Uh, you’d be surprised,” Neal grins.

She rolls her eyes at him. “It’s not too bad,” she informs, her eyes moving to Gold after Neal nods, to make sure that he’s heard too. She finds that Gold is staring at Hook with something that describing as rage would be a blatant euphemism.

“ _Speak_ ,” Gold hisses.

Emma turns towards Hook, who looks like an atheist who’s just witnessed the second coming of Christ, and gapes at them a couple of times before swallowing visibly. “It’s poisoned,” he finally says, his eyes gazing everywhere except in Neal’s direction. “Dreamshade.”

There’s a moment of silence, then Neal curses under his breath, because apparently that means something to him and it’s not good.

“I’m going to _kill_ you,” Gold threatens, almost yelling.

“For once, I agree,” Neal says, drily.

Emma’s fingers, still holding onto his coat, twitch as she looks between the three of them, trying to understand what she’s missing.

“Well?” she asks, urgently. “What’s the antidote, where do we get it?”

Her eyes move to Neal, who opens his mouth to answer and then closes it, barely repressing a grimace. Gold just keeps glaring daggers at Hook, and Emma is sure that if Neal wasn’t lying on top of him he’d be rushing to strangle the bastard.

“There’s none,” Hook finally supplies.

Emma turns sharply towards him, and she swears that for a moment she saw _red_. “ _What_ ,” she hisses.

“I’ll _find_ one,” Gold intervenes, in his voice an edge of desperation that Emma really doesn’t like. “I just need my shop, but I’ll find one. We get him to Storybrooke, _now_.”

“Yeah, uh, okay—” Emma mumbles, nodding frantically. “Shit, we need a—a taxi, and a plane—”

“It’ll be too late,” Hook interrupts, standing up. “You need something faster. Like my ship.” He pauses. “I can give you a ride, you’ll get there in time.”

“We won’t get a ride from _you_ ,” Emma states, standing up as well just so that she can stare him down and try to glare a hole in his skull. “This is all _your_ fault.”

“You don’t have a choice,” Hook replies, and thankfully he’s not looking as smug as he usually does, because Emma’s fingers are hitching to grab her gun, the image of Neal slumped to the ground with a poisoned hole in his chest burnt in her brain even when she’s not looking at him anymore. “He’s not making it if you take the long route.”

Emma turns around, her eyes landing on Neal, who’s looking sweaty as if he was running a fever, eyes glassy and shivers running through his body, then she moves to Henry, who’s standing behind all of them, face pressed between the bars and white-knuckled hands gripping onto them. He looks terrified, and Emma thinks that in this situation she’d probably sign a contract with the literal devil if it could help.

Gold looks angry, but he gives her the briefest of nods when their eyes meet.

She sharply turns back towards Hook, taking a threatening step towards him. “You lead the way,” she orders. “You try anything funny, I’ll shoot you in the back. _Gladly_.”

A small smirk shows up on Hook’s face, and she barely resists the urge to punch it away. “Don’t worry, love, I won’t. I get you there in record time, and then you let me go unscathed.”

“We’ll see,” she says, drily.

She’s the one who helps Neal up – because when Hook moved to assist her, she almost bit his head off –, and he’s not exactly dead weight, but he’s far from being stable on his feet. He’s obviously trying not to rely too much on her, but he’s doing a poor job at it.

“You are an asshole,” Neal says, his voice hoarse, when Hook decides to look at him in the eye again.

“Yeah, I know,” Hook replies, quietly.

Emma slides her arm around Neal’s waist and helps him putting his around her shoulders, to better support his weight.

“Henry, you can get here. Stay next to Mr Gold at all times, you hear me?” she says, glancing back to see that Henry is nodding and obeying, strangely quiet, before taking out her phone to call a cab.

“Don’t worry, we’ll fix you up,” she says, somehow managing to throw what she thinks is a convincing smile in Neal’s direction. “Gold has all sorts of stuff in that shop, there’ll be something.”

Neal smiles back, if only slightly. “Yeah. Thanks, Emma.”

She forces herself to keep up her smile, her grip on his waist tightening a little when she senses that he doesn’t believe her at all and she realizes that he probably has good reason to. That blow was meant to _kill_ Gold. It wouldn’t make sense to use a poison that he could find a cure for.

 _He’ll find something. He will. He has to_.

Henry is not losing his father ten minutes after meeting him. And she’s not losing Neal again, if only so that she can get more time to yell at him about how angry she is at him and how much he hurt her. He’s not going anywhere, damn him.

 

 

“You know, if this is payback for telling Henry that his father was a dead hero, it’s really in poor taste,” she comments, taking yet another look at that awful looking wound, as if merely thinking about it didn’t tie her stomach in knots. “Mine wasn’t a _suggestion_ , you know,” she adds, trying to keep her tone light.

Neal comes up with a slight grin. “Don’t worry, I get it. Much better than the truth.” He pauses. “He’ll get it too, after a while.”

Emma really wants to believe him, but a part of her can’t help fearing that Henry will just stay mad at her forever. Partially because she _knows_ that it wasn’t really him she was trying to protect.

Speaking of the devil, Henry slides his head in ten seconds later, taking a long look at Neal with a fearful expression that makes Emma want to run to him and hold him tight until it’s all over.

“Uh, I just wanted to check—” Henry says, trailing off as he looks for an excuse, which can’t be an easy task considering that he has been going back and forth every five minutes.

“Still kicking, buddy,” Neal assures, and Emma takes a mental note to give him some prize for the acting there, because he does sound pretty good. He still looks like shit, but there’s not much that they can do about that.

“You are supposed to keep an eye on Mr Gold and Hook,” Emma reprimands. At first, she thought she’d stay up to check that neither of them would try to kill the other – at the moment, her money is on Gold snapping Hook’s neck and taking his chances with piloting the ship –, but Henry is scared and Neal has obviously been trying to keep up a decent façade around the kid, instead of complaining and looking as in pain as he is, so she thought it would do neither of them any good to stay together. They’ll catch up. _Later_.

“They are just glaring at each other,” Henry complains. “Why can’t I stay here?”

“ _Because_ Neal needs rest. You two can talk later, alright?”

Henry sends a dubious glance Neal’s way, but he nods. “Okay,” he says, quietly. “I’ll, uh, go back up.”

Emma is completely sure he’ll be back in five minutes.

After a few moments of silence, Neal tries to take a look at the gaping hole in his chest and he hisses a couple of curses. “That bastard,” he completes, falling back against the pillows.

“So— you and Hook know each other?” Emma questions. She’s curious, and chatting can only help him keep his mind off the fact that he has been injected with some weird magical poison. There’s so much she doesn’t know about him, apparently, and the thought makes her a bit mad: there used to be a time when she thought she knew everything she needed to know about him.

“Yeah,” Neal scoffs, tiredly. “Spent some time together when I first arrived on Neverland.”

“ _Neverland_?” Emma echoes, raising her eyebrows. “That’s a real thing?”

“Oh, yeah. It’s a, uh, it’s a long story, but Peter Pan’s shadow took me, dropped me in the ocean near Hook’s ship, and he took me in. Stayed with him for a while, it wasn’t half bad.”

“But?” she prompts, because that tone doesn’t really speak happily ever after to her.

“But we had a, uh, a fight, you could say, and he sold me out to Pan’s people. Stayed on the Horror Island for a couple of centuries,” Neal shrugs, which he probably regrets two seconds flat later, judging by the grimace on his face. Emma instinctively reaches out for him, but she suppresses the reflex before she can touch him and make it worse.

“ _Centuries_?” she echoes instead, putting a pin on the ‘Horror Island’ part, because Peter Pan being a bad guy is probably the least surprising part in this whole thing. “Exactly how old are you?”

“Lost count,” he admits, with a slight grin. “I was fifteen and on Neverland for most of it, though, so.”

“My life keeps getting weirder and weirder,” Emma comments, shaking her head in disbelief. She had a child with a guy who not only is the son of Rumpelstiltskin – which she can accept, considering who _her_ parents turned out to be –, but who is a couple of centuries old. Suddenly those philosophical pieces of wisdom that he came up with every now and then make much more sense.

“Emma?”

“Uh?” she mumbles, raising her head as she realizes that she had been spacing out.

Neal’s eyes keep darting away from hers, and as he draws in a shaky breath she knows what he’s about to say before he actually gets around to saying it. “Look, I’m—I’m really, _really_ sorry for—”

“Ah-ah, no,” she immediately interrupts, shaking her head for emphasis. “No, we are not doing this. No death-bed apologies, we can talk about all that _later_. When you don’t look like you got run over by a truck and I can yell at you some more without feeling bad about it.”

“Emma—” he says, softly, but she’s not about to let him insist.

“No,” she cuts him off. “We are getting you to Storybrooke, Gold is pulling some antidote out of all that crap he keeps in his shop, you are spending some quality time with Henry, and _then_ we can do this. Possibly over some alcohol. But not _now_.”

He stares at her in silence, and she remembers seeing that stupid enamoured look a thousand times, the one that says ‘God, I have never seen anything so wonderful in my whole life’ and makes her stomach twist – back then, at least, it didn’t come with a side of crippling nostalgia and need to slap him for _daring_ to still look at her like that.

“Okay,” he finally says, quietly, a small smile on his face. “Later, then.”

She nods. “Later,” she states.


End file.
